Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/276

Rh was moved to San Francisco, where it continued for several years. It was finally among the casualties of the earthquake and fire that destroyed the San Francisco business district in 1906.

The Monmouth Democrat was started in 1892 by A. B. McMullian, who ran it for about a year, when it was suspended.

Next came the Monmouth Herald, which has continued to the present. It was established September 4, 1908, by W. T. Fogle, who sold it in 1910 to David E. Stitt. R. B. Swenson, the present owner, who has built the paper to a very prosperous status, purchased the Herald in March 1916.

Mr. Swenson, who had come west in 1913 and settled temporarily in southern California, came north in 1915 and helped the publishers wind up the affairs of the old Bandon Recorder, which was then being crowded out of the field by the up-and-coming Western World. Mr. Stitt, who had pioneered in Bandon as a livery stable proprietor and had gone into newspaper work as something better suited to his tastes and a better line in which to employ his two daughters, had left Bandon in 1910 for the non-competitive field of Monmouth.

When Mr. Swenson took hold, the Herald was printed a page at a time on a large California job-press. The plant consisted of "two jobbers and a motor, some type, stones, and a paper-cutter," as Mr. Swenson recently expressed it. It was operated in a small home in the Monmouth residence district. Since then the Herald has changed presses three times, each a little better than the previous one. The new owner continued to set type by hand for a year or two, then bought a Unitype, soon displacing that by a linotype.

The Herald on one occasion printed "next week's paper" and put it in the post office ahead of "this week's paper." Explaining this chronological phenomenon, Mr. Swenson says the family (synonymous with office force) was to take a two weeks' vacation in the Yosemite. They filled the advance edition entirely with reminiscences and other time copy, climbed into the car, and headed south. Mr. Swenson was one of the first Oregon publishers to change his format to tabloid. He likes it that way.

Independence.—Martin Luther Pipes, who had arrived in Oregon May 17, 1875, from Mansfield, Louisiana, with his bride of a few weeks, went immediately to Independence, where he was to start the town's first newspaper. He taught school for a year, then (in 1876) started the Semi-Weekly Telegram. Mr. Pipes, a stanch Democrat, was assisted with the mechanical work by W. P. Conoway, an equally zealous Republican, from Missouri. The editor, who had started with the traditional "hatful" of type and an obsolete press, had to depend heavily on Conoway for the mechanical work, and not being much of a printer himself, found it necessary to watch